The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought by Alexander F. Chamberlain (read full novel txt) đ
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With many peoples the name âfatherâ is applied to others than the male parent of the child. The following remarks of McLennan, regarding the Tamil and Telugu of India, will stand for not a few other primitive tribes: âAll the brothers of a father are usually called fathers, but, in strictness, those who are older than the father are called great fathers, and those who are younger, little fathers. With the Puharies, all the brothers of a father are equally fathers to his children.â In Hawaii, the term âmale parentâ âapplied equally to the father, to the uncles, and even to distant relations.â In Japan, the paternal uncle is called âlittle fatherâ and the maternal uncle âsecond little fatherâ (100. 389, 391).
A lengthy discussion of these terms, with a wealth of illustration from many primitive languages, will be found in Westermarck (166. 86-94).
Father-Right.
Of the Roman family it has been said: âIt was a community comprising men and things. The members were maintained by adoption as well as by consanguinity. The father was before all things the chief, the general administrator. He was called father even when he had no son; paternity was a question of law, not one of persons. The heir is no more than the continuing line of the deceased person; he was heir in spite of himself for the honour of the defunct, for the lares, the hearth, the manes, and the hereditary sepulchreâ (100. 423). In ancient Rome the paterfamilias and the patina potestas are seen in their extreme types. Letourneau remarks further: âAbsolute master, both of things and of people, the paterfamilias had the right to kill his wife and to sell his sons. Priest and king in turn, it was he who represented the family in their domestic worship; and when, after his death, he was laid by the side of his ancestors in the common tomb, he was deified, and helped to swell the number of the household godsâ (100. 433).
Post thus defines the system of âfather-rightâ:â
âIn the system of âfather-rightâ the child is related only to the father and to the persons connected with him through the male line, but not with his mother and the persons connected with him through the female line. The narrowest group organized according to father-right consists of the father and his children. The mother, for the most part, appears in the condition of a slave to the husband. To the patriarchal family in the wider sense belong the children of the sons of the father, but not the children of his daughters; the brothers and sisters of the same father, but not those merely related to the same mother; the children of the brother of the same father, but not the children of the sisters of the same father, etc. With every wife the relationship ceases every timeâ (127. I. 24).
The system of father-right is found scattered over the whole globe. It is found among the Indo-European peoples (Aryans of Asia, Germans, Slavs, Celts, Romans), the Mongol-Tartar tribes, Chinese, Japanese, and some of the Semitic nations; in northern Africa and scattered through the western part of the continent, among the Kaffirs and Hottentots; among some tribes in Australia and Polynesia and the two Americas (the culture races).
The position of the father among those peoples with whom strict mother-right prevails is thus sketched by Zmigrodski (174.206):â
âThe only certain thing was motherhood and the maternal side of the family,âmother, daughter, granddaughter, that was the fixed stem continuing with certainty. Father, son, grandson, were only the leaves, which existed only until the autumnal wind of death tore them away, to hurl them into the abyss of oblivion. In that epoch no one said, âI am the son of such a father and the grandson of such a grandfather,â but âI am the son of such a mother and the grandson of such a grandmother.â The inheritance went not to the son and grandson, but to the daughter and to the granddaughter, and the sons received a dowry as do the daughters in our society of to-day. In marriage the woman did not assume the name of the man, but vice versa. The husband of a woman, although the father of her children, was considered not so near a relative of them as the wifeâs brother, their uncle.â
Dr. Brinton says, concerning mother-right among the Indians of North America (412. 48):â
âHer children looked upon her as their parent, but esteemed their father as no relation whatever. An unusually kind and intelligent Kolosch Indian was chided by a missionary for allowing his father to suffer for food. âLet him go to his own people,â replied the Kolosch, âthey should look after him.â He did not regard a man as in any way related or bound to his paternal parent.â
In a certain Polynesian mythological tale, the hero is a young man, âthe name of whose father had never been told by his mother,â and this has many modern parallels (115. 97). On the Gold Coast of West Africa there is a proverb, âWise is the son that knows his own fatherâ (127.1. 24), a saying found elsewhere in the world,âindeed, we have it also in English, and Shakespeare presents but another view of it when he tells us: âIt is a wise father that knows his own child.â
In many myths and folk-and fairy-tales of all peoples the discovery by the child of its parent forms the climax, or at least one of the chief features of the plot; and we have also those stories which tell how parents have been killed unwittingly by their own children, or children have been slain unawares by their parents.
Father-King.
In his interesting study of âRoyalty and Divinityâ (75), Dr. von Held has pointed out many resemblances between the primitive concepts âKingâ and âGod.â Both, it would seem, stand in close connection with âFather.â To quote from Dr. von Held: âFathership (Vaterschaft, patriarcha), lordship (Herrentum), and kingship (Konigtum) are, therefore (like rex and [Greek: Basileus]), ideas not only linguistically, but, to even a greater degree really, cognate, having altogether very close relationship to the word and idea âGod.â Of necessity they involve the existence and idea of a people, and therefore are related not only to the world of faith, but also to that of intellect and of material things.â
The Emperor of China is the âfather and mother of the empire,â his millions of subjects being his âchildrenâ; and the ancient Romans had no nobler title for their emperor than pater patrice, the âfather of his country,â an appellation bestowed in these later days upon the immortal first President of the United States.
In the Yajnavalkya, one of the old Sanskrit law-books, the king is bidden to be âtowards servants and subjects as a fatherâ (75. 122), and even Mirabeau and Gregoire, in the first months of the States-General, termed the king âle pere de tous les Franqais,â while Louis XII. and Henry IV. of France, as well as Christian III. of Denmark, had given to them the title âfather of the people.â The name pater patrice was not borne by the Caesars alone, for the Roman Senate conferred the title upon Cicero, and offered it to Marius, who refused to accept it. âFather of his Countryâ was the appellation of Cosmo deâ Medici, and the Genoese inscribed the same title upon the base of the statue erected to Andrea Doria. One of the later Byzantine Emperors, Andronicus PalĂŠologus, even went so far as to assume this honoured title. Nor has the name âFather of the Peopleâ been confined to kings, for it has been given also to Gabriel du Pineau, a French lawyer of the seventeenth century.
The âdivinity that doth hedge a kingâ and the fatherhood of the sovereign reach their acme in Peru, where the Inca was king, father, even god, and the halo of âdivine rightâ has not ceased even yet to encircle the brows of the absolute monarchs of Europe and the East.
Landesvater (Vater des Volkes) is the proudest designation of the German Kaiser. âLittle Fatherâ is alike the literal meaning of Attila, the name of the far-famed leader of the âHuns,â in the dark ages of Europe, and of batyushka, the affectionate term by which the peasant of Russia speaks of the Czar.
Nana, âGrandfather,â is the title of the king of Ashanti in Africa, and âSireâ was long in France and England a respectful form of address to the monarch.
Some of the aboriginal tribes of America have conferred upon the President of the United States the name of the âGreat Father at Washington,â the âGreat White Father,â and âFatherâ was a term they were wont to apply to governors, generals, and other great men of the whites with whom they came into contact.
The father as head of the family is the basis of the idea of âfather-king.â This is seen among the Matchlapis, a Kaffir tribe, where âthose who own a sufficient number of cattle to maintain a family have the right to the title of chiefâ; this resembles the institution of the pater familias in ancient Latium (100. 459,533).
Dr. von Held thus expresses himself upon this point: âThe first, and one may say also the last, naturally necessary society of man is the family in the manifold forms out of which it has been historically developed. Its beginning and its apex are, under given culture-conditions, the man who founds it, the father. What first brought man experientially to creation as a work of love was fatherhood. This view is not altered by the fact that the father, in order to preserve, or, what is the same, to continue to produce, to bring up, must command, force, punish. If the family depends on no higher right, it yet appears as the first state, and then the father appears not only as father, but also as kingâ (75.
119).
The occurrence to-day of âKingâ as a surname takes us back to a time when the head of the family enjoyed the proud title, which the Romans conferred upon CĂŠsar Augustus, Pater et Princeps, the natural development from Ovidâs virque paterque gregis.
The Romans called their senators patres, and we now speak of the âcity fathers,â aldermen, eldermen, in older English, and the âfathersâ of many a primitive people are its rulers and legislators. The term âfatherâ we apply also to those who were monarchs and chiefs in realms of human activity other than that of politics. Following in the footsteps of the Latins, who spoke of Zeno as Pater stoicorum, of Herodotus as Pater historioe, and even of the host of an inn as Pater cenoe, we speak of âfatheringâ an idea, a plot, and the like, and denominate âfather,â the pioneer scientists, inventors, sages, poets, chroniclers of the race.
From pater the Romans derived patrimonium, patrimony, âwhat was inherited from the father,â an interesting contrast to matrimonium; patronus, âpatron, defender, master of slavesâ; patria (_terra_), âfatherland,ââOvid uses paterna terra, and Horace speaks of paternum flumen; patricius, âof fatherly dignity, high-born, patrician,â etc. Word after word in the classic tongues speaks of the exalted position of the father, and many of these have come into our own language through the influence of the peoples of the Mediterranean.
Father-Priest.
Said Henry Ward Beecher: âLook at home, father-priest, mother-priest; your church is a hundred-fold heavier responsibility than mine can be. Your priesthood is from Godâs own hands.â The priesthood of the father is widespread. Mr. Gomme tells us: âCertainly among the Hindus, the Greeks, the
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